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Introduction
Sport lies beyond the traditional focus of management research; however, it displays similar examples of LGBT exclusion to those found in wider management and organisational literature. This paper examines the nature of this exclusion and argues that high-profile change initiatives to promote LGBT participation in sport are only effective if they impact upon the lived experiences of LGBT participants in the heterogeneous spaces within sports institutions. These spaces include, but are not limited to, the locker rooms, pitches and stadia where sporting activity takes place.
The paper begins with an overview of LGBT exclusion from sport, drawing out similarities with wider organisational LGBT marginalisation, and highlighting how heteronormative cultures within sport create different forms of exclusion and marginalisation across the LGBT spectrum. Heteronormativity is seen to be particularly potent in the spaces where people participate in sport, but its effects are not experienced uniformly across these heterogeneous spaces.
A conceptual framework is then developed to further understand the spatially contextual nature of heteronormativity, and is then used as a lens through which to read examples from the sports sociology literature of its impact upon LGBT sports participants. Insights from Butler’s (1990) gender performativity and from “spatial turns” in studies of workplace and sporting environments (e.g. Tyler and Cohen, 2010; Van Ingen, 2003) highlight how heteronormative gendered “performances” are materialised in specific spaces and locales associated with sport. These are viewed as examples of Lefebvre’s (1991) “lived spaces” which might be experienced differently to the “conceived spaces” of policies and activities at an institutional level. Sara Ahmed’s (2006, 2012) work further illuminates this difference between institutional diversity initiatives and the heteronormative nature of specific institutional spaces. The conceptual framework then informs an analysis of change and diversity initiatives to combat discrimination and promote LGBT inclusion in sport. First, awareness campaigns, as typified by the Rainbow Laces campaign in the UK and similar high-profile initiatives, are observed to operate at Lefebvre’s abstract level of “conceived space” which, whilst valuable in terms of visibility, are only fully effective if they reach the level of “lived spaces” where heteronormative cultures are experienced. LGBT sports groups are then examined as a different type of initiative, but one which is also has a limited ability to challenge the heteronormativity of...